Nikon 9000 for 6X12 negs

[Juergen Sattler]

I agree with Kirk - I have the 9000 and also have Vuescan installed, but I find I get better (or at least same results) with the Nikon software. It just seems more intuitive for me. I have a number of presets stored in the Nikon software for the different films I use and I get dependable and consistent results that way.

[Ben R]

That is good to know, Silverfast is very expensive for the 9000, $500 and more if I don't pretend to live in the US!

[clay harmon]

I bounce back on forth on Nikon Scan and Vuescan with the LS8000. In general, I find that the film presets in vuescan give me superior results on negatives with a lot of contrast. I just fiddle around with the different CI options until I get a histogram that looks good. Vuescan also seems to be better at pulling detail out of the shadow areas of negatives. That said, with some judicious fiddling around with the curve and the analog gain dialog in Nikon Scan, I can generally get something acceptable. Vuescan's main benefit is that 95% of the time, I can just do a little minor tweaking and get a great result. With Nikon Scan, each negative seems to demand a little more attention.

I tried the demo version of Silverfast about six months ago, and I thought the user interface was a horror show. Maybe it does some great things with the raw data from the scanner, but I needed a Rosetta Stone to decipher how the hell to get there.

[Ben R]

I have to admit to having liked the HDR setting on Silverfast, one click, no presets or fiddling and you get all the information there is to have. That way you can do all the work in the lot more userfriendly enviroment of photoshop. Does anyone know if the multiscan and multiexposure settings are as useless with a dedicated scanner as they are on the flatbed due to alignment issues caused by cheap stepping motors?

[Cesar Barreto]

Ben, if you're still looking at b&w scans, I don't see much use for multi-anything, just because you can get everything you might need on a single pass.
Someone told on a dedicated forum at Yahoo that he found and corrected a small error on the way the holder travelled inside the scanner, and I notice the same when I get two halves of a 6x17 negative with slight misalignment, so it makes me think that multipassing would most probably add noise and not avoid it. And common negatives will never have densities high enough to ask for multiexposure.

[Kirk Gittings]

Ben,
No it generally works better on a 9000 and can lower shadow noise and increase shadow separation. Having said that both 9000&8000 sometimes suffer banding with MP, which can sometimes be solved by moving the film to another slot.